DECEMBER 5, 2025 | ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT | By Allison Garcia
As part of their visiting series in film and culture, the Film and Media Studies department at Colorado College hosted a screening of Humans in the Loop on Wednesday, Nov. 19. The screening was followed by a panel of CC faculty from across academic disciplines discussing the main focus of the film, artificial intelligence and family.
Directed by Aranya Sahay, Humans in the Loop is set in Jharkhand, India, presenting the audience with a storyline of an Adivasi woman who becomes a data labeller for an AI company to support her family. The film examines the increasingly frictionless nature of artificial intelligence and its promise of instant access and seamless efficiency.
As Rushaan Kumar, professor of feminist and gender studies explained, “AI is frictionless access and frictionless information. What you’re describing is a side effect of that frictionlessness—a flattening of information and experience.”
This flattening, Kumar argued, emerges not only from the reduced and selective datasets that AI models rely on but also from the ways these systems standardize expression. Even everyday tools like Grammarly subtly sand down individual voices and stylistic roughness until “your writing starts to sound the same.”
Many of the panelists connected this idea to a moment in the film where, inside a porcupine cave, the characters run their hands along stone and moss textures and sensations that remain beyond what AI can truly replicate.
The panel highlighted a range of insights on AI and representation, noting that the film presents a sanitized view of artificial intelligence, one that glosses over the environmental impacts and the harsh realities of data-labeling labor.
Professor of Math and Computer Science Corey B. Scott noted, “If this story were set in Uganda, workers would be labeling images of child sexual assault, not pictures of people playing soccer.”
Even as the film incorporates multiple perspectives, it concludes with hopeful imagery, suggesting that ethical AI is achievable if we teach it ethics. Beyond its narrative, the film sparks meaningful conversation; its scenes invite reflection and dialogue that resonate with contemporary issues, highlighting its relevance to the present moment.